Paul Gilbert Quotes

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

If I get an idea for a song, I have a melody for it. I'm a musician first. I'm not limited by the fretboard.

There are only so many notes so there must be only so many melodies.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

There are only seven chords, and I believe every song has already been written.

When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer.

I like inventive melodies and chord changes, a little bit of creativity.

Being honest and spontaneous is important when making music. But I'm also really logical when I compose.

Music has a lot in com­mon with math­e­mat­ics. But in music, two and two need not make four: they add up to what­ever you wish.

When I listen to my favorite songwriters, they have such simple melodies and chords. I occasionally manage to stop at the right time, but all too often I keep on going until I have way too many notes and words. But that's just what I do.

My father taught me to read music and play the piano-but not well, even though people have said that I'm a natural musician.

I started playing guitar before I can really remember, and I started writing really early, too.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don't quite know how to explain it but it's there. These can't be the only notes in the world, there's got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys.

Soloing was pretty easy for me because it was probably the first thing I've ever done.

Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion.

I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.

I don't have a very disciplined approach to practicing or anything, but I do tend to have a guitar around most of the time, which I strum on most of the day.

I feel pretty comfortable in a lot of different musical styles. I like rhythm, and I like melody and so forth.

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.